David Hare: 'It's absurd, but I feel insecure'

David Hare is one of Britain's most successful and political playwrights. His work has taken on everything from the invasion of Iraq to the global financial meltdown, yet today he finds himself confounded by world events, and uncertain what to write

'I'm so incredibly lonely as a dramatist' … David Hare. Photograph: David Levene

David Hare: 'It's absurd, but I feel insecure'

David Hare is one of Britain's most successful and political playwrights. His work has taken on everything from the invasion of Iraq to the global financial meltdown, yet today he finds himself confounded by world events, and uncertain what to write

Friday 2 September 2011 19.09 EDT
First published on Friday 2 September 2011 19.09 EDT

Sir David Hare is in a quandary. He doesn't know how to write about today's politics. "For me the experience is very much as in the late 1970s, expecting Britain to break down into anarchy, or to turn left – and Britain turned right. It silenced me for four years. I didn't know what to say."

And, now he concedes, as we drink tea in his Hampstead study, he's facing a similar problem. "It's very hard to write when it seems that individual countries or governments are not in control of their own destinies. They seem to be at the whim of a system that failed catastrophically, and which is held to be faulty by those who supported it in the first place."

This is odd to hear because Hare has made his name by transmuting political actualité into art. His writing shared for decades the radical politics of those – Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Barker, among others – who came to the fore in the late 60s and early 70s, but his more readily used contemporary events as source material.

His trilogy – Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993) – anatomised the failings of three British institutions (the Anglican church, the legal system and the Labour party, respectively); he indicted the privatisation of the railways in The Permanent Way (2004); Stuff Happens (2004) tapped his rage at the invasion of Iraq; The Power of Yes (2009) addressed the financial crisis. Hare even satirically savaged the Murdoch press in Pravda, a play written with Brenton in 1985, long before Tom Watson MP got his teeth into News International's phone hacking scandal.

Last year Hare described what he does as a playwright in a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature: "'Are you the person who makes plays out of what's going on in the papers?' is never a question asked in a friendly manner. Nor is the answer much liked: 'Yes. Somebody has to.'

"I had to write that essay to explain what I'm doing because I'm so incredibly lonely as a dramatist – nobody does what I do, and some are dubious about it."

It's even odder to hear of Hare's quandary since one reason we're meeting is because he's just been awarded the PEN/Pinter prize. It was established two years ago to celebrate Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and is given annually to a British writer of outstanding merit who casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world. "I don't really recognise myself as unflinching or unswerving," laughs the 63-year-old playwright. But Pinter's widow, historian Lady Antonia Fraser, did, arguing in the award blurb: "In the course of his long, distinguished career, David Hare has never failed to speak out fearlessly on the subject of politics in the broadest sense."

Aren't these the times when politics in its broadest sense cries out as it never has before for Hare's treatment? Perhaps this seeming writer's block is honest discombobulation at a world gone incomprehensible. "This feels like one of those moments when everything's changing, and changing because of the double blackmail of the banks. The first blackmail was when the banks said: 'We have destroyed the economy but you have to bail us out.' The second blackmail now is the banks saying: 'We have to continue in the same way we did before which destroyed the economy,' and we have such a weak government that they believe the City of London must be appeased."

Hare cites a recent speech by chancellor George Osborne. "Osborne said our economy is in wonderful shape because we are open to speculators. Since when has the criterion of a successful country, not to mention the economy, meant it's a pleasing place for the gnomes of Zürich? That is Osborne's sine qua non for this economy, but there's meant to be more to governing than pleasing the financial markets.

"In the 60s the Trotskyist idea was that banking would bring politics down, that people would lose all political control over their lives and the political system would fall apart." Perhaps, he muses, that is coming to pass. "We have a generation of leaders – Merkel, Sarkozy, Obama, Cameron – who don't seem to have the faintest idea of what they're doing. Politics is now nothing more than people saying hopeful things with their fingers crossed.

"One reason the riots happened is that powerless people were trying to assert control desperately. The riots were partly about high prices. Privatisation in the railways, gas, electricity and water has been a wholesale disaster creating an extra layer of profiteering and greed – and in so doing contributing to making things very expensive. Rioters were grabbing consumer goods because the cost of things is completely crazy. The usual symptom of a recession is that things get cheaper, but that hasn't happened this time."

Those who this week watched Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz and Michael Gambon in Page Eight, the feature-length BBC2 drama he wrote and directed, may well think reports of Hare's block as a radical writer are greatly exaggerated. His suave film tackled the subversion of the security services by a government in thrall to American power, and in particular, how MI5 was hobbled by a British premier conniving with the US government to torture Britons abroad.

Page Eight is also that unexpected thing – a drama about the romance of public service. It has the allure of a western: you root for Nighy's spy Johnny Worricker as he goes on the lam pursued by wicked government stooges, just as you rooted for Gary Cooper in High Noon when he did his taxpayer-funded duty against bad men.

"It's about how the security services were ruined by politicians. You had MI5 advising that there were no weapons of mass destruction. What did politicians do with this information? They told MI5 to go away and come back with the right information that justified invasion. My aim was to present the security services as not different from you and me. They're regular folk."

This is a dramatic departure: James Bond and George Smiley were hardly regular folk. "In John le Carré, of whom I'm a fantastic admirer, there was a weltschmerz that came from them knowing they weren't better than the enemy." Smiley's global melancholy has been supplanted by Worricker's professional insecurity. "What's happened in the past 10 years is that the security services have joined that list of professions in which if you come to a rational conclusion, the rational conclusion is thrown out in favour of a political one."

Hare's agent Jenny Casarotto told him that Page Eight made her feel proud to be British. Why? "Because somebody in MI5 does the job decently. And that's what we admire – the teacher tries to teach, the policeman tries to be civil dealing with people crazy with drugs." Hare's hero in Page Eight is doing something akin, as somebody puts it in his film, to "a dishonourable job in an honourable way".

Hare is dealing, then, with questions of honour. I wonder how he feels about the his knighthood. He accepted it in 1998, under a Labour government untainted by an Iraqi invasion. Doesn't that tarnish your radical credentials? "It was an honour for which I didn't have to wait for someone to open an envelope and announce I'd won. They just gave it to you. To anyone who criticises me for it, I can say, 'Has my work declined or become less radical since?' My own view is no. I have written some of my most radical work – Stuff Happens, The Power of Yes – since."

We're also meeting because Hare has a new play, which received its world premiere in Chichester last night. South Downs was commissioned by the Terence Rattigan Trust to serve as a curtain-raiser to a new production of The Browning Version marking the centenary of the playwright's birth. Hare's play is set in 1962, at a public school similar to the one he attended, Lancing College in Sussex. It's about a lonely adolescent called Blakemore and meditates on education, faith and teen friendship in the distant days before the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

Hare denies South Downs is entirely autobiographical and yet Blakemore's absentee father is a sailor, just as Hare's was, and his mother sees education as a tool for creating a secure adult life. "My mother was Scottish and she believed that all you need is education. She thought it would get you security." In South Downs, Blakemore's mum urges her son to aspire to become an accountant, since most of Marks & Spencer's board of directors are accountants – and there's nothing more secure than M&S. "Having encouraged me to go to school because I was capable of being academic, the family then worried over whether I should leave and join a firm of accountants in Bexhill."

But young Hare stayed at Lancing with contemporaries Christopher Hampton and Tim Rice. "I had a wonderful teacher, Harry Guest, one of whose lessons was him telling us about going to a party in east London where he met Harold Pinter. We were being kept up to date with London culture."

It was the first, though not the last time Hare would be dazzled by Pinter's aura. "I introduced his Nobel lecture in 2005 for television. We got quite close then, when he was so ill. The night he died [in 2008], the last conversation he had with Antonia was about The Reader [Hare's film adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's novel directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet as a former Nazi death camp guard], she told me afterwards. It makes the hairs stand on my neck to think about this even now. And my last conversation with him was about it, too."

But the admiration of Nobel laureates and the countless honours Hare has achieved count for little in one sense: he remains as insecure about the world as he did when he was a schoolboy. "I put this into South Downs where Blakemore feels that everybody else understands the secret codes for how things work, but he doesn't. He's lonely because he's always asking questions about what the rules are and he doesn't seem able to fake acceptance of them. That's why he scares people and doesn't socialise.

"I'm 63, but this is exactly how I feel about myself now. I don't understand the rules." Surely, you don't feel insecure socialising? "I do, actually. I spend so much time alone at parties thinking, 'Is everybody else failing to understand the way of the world, or is it just me?' Nicole [Farhi, his clothes designer wife] says we've wasted more time outside parties than we've spent inside them." But didn't insecure adolescent David think you'd grow up into mature mastery of the world? "I bet he did. I remember having a powerful fantasy that as an adult I'd be picking up hitch-hikers and telling the young people I picked up about the ways of the world. But I've never felt secure in the world, or that I've anything useful to impart."

All this is odd coming from a man, you'd think, used to creating roles, albeit for others, to perform. After all, the lesson that Hare's alter ego Blakemore is told is that one must, in life as in art, perform a role. Belinda Duffield, an actress and mother of a pupil, provides – as often happens in Hare's plays – a woman's obliging way out for a man in existential crisis, suggesting that he acts as if he understands and accepts the rules. Such is her lesson, and South Downs at these moments envisages education not as a slightly different tool for achieving adult security than the one Hare's mother imagined it as.

Why is a man redeemed by a woman such a recurring theme? "In my own life women have been fresh water, and it's always been my kindness that has been reasserted through women. The world of men has always seemed … " he pauses for a long time. "The problem at school was that there weren't any girls. Poor Blakemore has barely spoken to one and that was my problem, too."

Time to go. Cycling over Hampstead Heath, I wonder if by dramatising his school days Hare is retreating from the bafflement of politics. Probably not: South Downs, set between the end of the empire and the advent of comprehensive secondary education, is as political as anything he's written. Nothing is more political than education, especially today with Michael Gove bankrolling Toby Young's so-called "free" school.

Perhaps South Downs is also a lament for the childhood self who didn't learn all he needed to get through life; who didn't get the security his mother sought for him. Either way, it remains puzzling that a man of the theatre so used to inventing roles finds it temperamentally difficult to pull on a mask and strut his real-life stuff. "It does seem absurd that someone like me would feel so insecure," he told me earlier. "But I do."

• This article was amended on 5 September 2011. The original referred to Nobel laureate Sir Harold Pinter. This has been corrected.